wedrifid comments on BOOK DRAFT: 'Ethics and Superintelligence' (part 1) - Less Wrong

11 Post author: lukeprog 13 February 2011 10:09AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (107)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: wedrifid 15 February 2011 10:06:46AM *  7 points [-]

I still don't get what kind of 'right' people are talking about.

Very similar to your right, for all practical purposes. A slight difference in how it is described though. You describe (if I recall), 'right' as being "in accordance with XiXiDu's preferences". Using Eliezer's style of terminology you would instead describe 'right' as more like a photograph of what XiXiDu's preferences are, without them necessarily including any explicit reference to XiXiDu.

In most cases it doesn't really matter. It starts to matter once people start saying things like "But what if XiXiDu could take a pill that made him prefer that he eat babies? Would that mean it became right? Should XiXiDu take the pill?"

By the way, 'right' would also mean what the photo looks like after it has been airbrushed a bit in photoshop by an agent better at understanding what we actually want than we are at introspection and communication. So it's an abstract representation of what you would want if you were smarter and more rational but still had your preferences.

Also note that Eliezer sometimes blurs the line between 'right' meaning what he would want and what some abstract "all of humanity" would want.